As Mark St. Pierre trial ends, the question arises: What did Mayor Ray Nagin know, and when?

It was a fleeting moment in a 13-day corruption trial, a brief reference by federal prosecutors to a single document buried in crates of boxes.

View full sizeAlex Brandon, The Associated Press archiveFormer New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has consistently claimed that he thought it was Greg Meffert who was providing him with things like parties on the yacht, first-class airfare to Hawaii in 2004 and Jamaica in 2005 and a 2006 trip to a campaign event in Chicago. Nagin and Meffert were photographed on May 20, 2006, when Nagin was re-elected.

But the one-page letter from Mark St. Pierre to then-Mayor Ray Nagin in September 2006 presaged the question now on many New Orleanians' minds since St. Pierre, the former city technology vendor, and Greg Meffert, the former city technology chief, have been convicted of a multimillion-dollar bribery scheme in Nagin's City Hall:

What did the mayor know, and when did he know it?

In the unsigned letter, St. Pierre explains that he, and not Meffert, owned a yacht called the "Silicon Bayou." The letter said St. Pierre didn't want to "be perceived as passing on anything of value to Greg while he worked for the City," but St. Pierre adds, "I thought, and continue to think, we would again work together in some manner."

Never mind that St. Pierre had already let Meffert charge $130,000 on a corporate credit card. Never mind that by that point, he was already paying Meffert tens of thousands of dollars for what they claimed was post-City Hall consulting work.

The focus of the letter was the Silicon Bayou. It was a boat Nagin knew firsthand, from the "sunset thank-you cruise" he held on it as a re-election celebration about six weeks earlier.

St. Pierre, who was convicted Thursday of 53 federal counts of public corruption, and Meffert, who pleaded guilty last year to taking $860,000 in kickbacks for funneling no-bid work to St. Pierre, worked together with their shared lawyer to carefully craft the letter to the mayor, to address a story in the newspaper earlier in the week in which Nagin said Meffert informed him the yacht was his.

The letter may have played the most minor of roles in convicting St. Pierre, but it called to mind the dozens of references to Nagin during the trial and may have done more than any piece of evidence to establish that Nagin was unaware of Meffert's relationship with one of the city's highest-paid vendors.

That Nagin received various gratuities from St. Pierre's firm NetMethods is not in doubt. But whether he knew the source of the gifts is very much in question. He's consistently claimed that he thought it was Meffert who was providing him with things like parties on the yacht, first-class airfare to Hawaii in 2004 and Jamaica in 2005 and a 2006 trip to a campaign event in Chicago -- an event that was hosted by St. Pierre, among others.

Little new ground

The St. Pierre trial shed little new light on what the mayor knew and when. In addition to the trips and the yacht, jurors heard testimony and saw documents showing that Nagin paved the way for Meffert to hire St. Pierre permanently and without open competition, by signing an executive order that changed the procurement process just in Meffert's technology department.

Meffert also said he was directed by Nagin's 2006 re-election campaign to raise $250,000 and that he did so using two city vendors: Ed Burns, president for state and local contracts for the city's lead technology contractor, Ciber Inc., and St. Pierre. On the stand, Burns said he raised $100,000, but he gave no details of how. Also on the stand, St. Pierre admitted raising at least $45,000 for the mayor illegally by reimbursing his employees and friends for their donations. But there was no indication that the mayor or his campaign knew about St. Pierre's illegal reimbursements. Nagin hasn't responded to multiple requests for comment on the campaign contributions.

Meffert detailed a gratuity for the mayor that hadn't come up before when he testified that he charged to the NetMethods credit card a party for Nagin's 50th birthday at Sweet Lorraine's in 2006. Nagin did not respond to questions this week about that party.

St. Pierre's old friend Jimmy Goodson and two lawn maintenance company owners testified about the grass-cutting services they provided for Nagin's house on Park Island in Bayou St. John, just down the street from Meffert's house. Goodson paid for the service and got reimbursed for it by St. Pierre's NetMethods. When The Times-Picayune reported that story in 2009, Nagin denied that someone else paid for the maintenance of his property.

"I pay for maintenance on my home. Your source is not good," he emailed the newspaper at the time. After the prosecution produced the checks that paid for Nagin's lawn care, the mayor did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

'One degree closer'

Meffert also testified that he and Nagin didn't discuss the source of the Hawaii airplane tickets. That jibes with what Nagin has said in the past. When the newspaper first asked him about the trip in 2009, he responded indignantly, "There's no vendor, man." A few days later he acknowledged that a vendor paid for the trip, but using a company that did not have a contract with City Hall.

He said he thought originally that Meffert had paid. But some new information about another trip did come out at trial -- the Jamaica trip shortly after Hurricane Katrina, the one Nagin called a "blur" when it was first revealed that Meffert's NetMethods credit card paid for it. Meffert testified that when he couldn't coordinate the dates for Nagin to take a private jet to the Caribbean island nation, he simply left his clearly marked NetMethods card with Nagin's secretary to buy commercial tickets for Nagin, his wife, their three children and their bodyguard.

"I was unaware and certainly surprised to see that Meffert gave the credit card to the mayor's secretary to make arrangements," said Rafael Goyeneche, whose Metropolitan Crime Commission filed an ethics complaint against Nagin in 2009. "It certainly puts it one step closer, one degree closer to the mayor."

There was also extensive testimony from Burns about Nagin's trip with his wife, Meffert and others to the New Orleans Saints' first-ever NFC championship game appearance, in January 2007 in Chicago. Nagin reimbursed the owner of a private plane for the equivalent of coach airfare to Chicago and on to Las Vegas.

The plane was provided by Aaron Bennett, whose firm Benetech took over Ciber's technology contract shortly after the trip. But Burns testified that he paid for tickets for the mayor to the football game, tickets that turned out to be bogus. Burns said he then got the mayor and his wife into a suite for free. Burns also said he provided Lincoln Town Cars for the mayor's party to get to the game, but the costs of that were never addressed.

Federal probe continues

After St. Pierre was convicted Thursday, U.S. Attorney Jim Letten said the federal criminal case was still under investigation. Julian Murray, a former federal prosecutor and current criminal defense attorney, said that leaves the door open regarding Nagin.

"It basically goes back to what Meffert tells (federal investigators)," Murray said. "The jury believed him in this case, and I don't think they need St. Pierre. If Meffert says, 'I didn't tell the mayor who paid,' then that's that. But if he says, 'We decided to keep it quiet,' that could be something." It's been more than five years since the trips, but if there was a conspiracy, the five-year statute of limitations wouldn't start counting until Nagin left office, Murray said.

But Dane Ciolino, a Loyola University Law professor, said the St. Pierre trial, if anything, makes it less likely that Nagin will face any federal criminal charges.

"My best speculation on it is that the U.S. attorney's office didn't learn anything new at the trial they didn't already know for years," Ciolino. "That the trial turned out bad for Mr. St. Pierre doesn't make it any more or less likely that they'd pursue any charges against Mayor Nagin."

More likely is that the conclusion of the St. Pierre trial will fuel the pending state ethics charges against Nagin. He faces two charges before the state Ethics Adjudicatory Board, one for receiving gratuities from St. Pierre's firm NetMethods and another regarding his ownership of a granite countertop business, Stone Age. The case involving Meffert and St. Pierre was postponed, pending the results of the St. Pierre federal criminal trial. State records show Nagin's attorney, Harry Rosenberg, was in negotiations with the Board of Ethics, which is prosecuting the charges.

A conference with an administrative law judge is scheduled for next Friday. Rosenberg declined to comment on a pending matter.

Goyeneche said all of the testimony about Nagin in the St. Pierre trial will make the ethics case "more compelling for the ethics administration."

Unanswered questions

The September 2006 letter Meffert, St. Pierre and Drake drafted suggests that Nagin could have been in the dark about all of it -- the boat, the credit card, the payoffs -- even two full months after a local blog, the American Zombie, first reported that Meffert had a vendor's credit card, that St. Pierre and his partners were the boat's true owners and that the Silicon Bayou had been serving as City Hall's free party headquarters.

Of course, evidence in the St. Pierre trial showed that St. Pierre would also stop at nothing to create an artificial paper trail.

For example, he once wrote an email to a city tech official promising to fix his malfunctioning crime cameras, then wrote to his friends that he didn't mean it and just wanted the offer in the public record.

And his key defense at trial was that he repeatedly went to lawyers to make sure his dealings with Meffert were kosher. But prosecutors showed that he always left out the facts that would have forced the attorneys to stop him and Meffert from continuing their scheme -- such as the all-access credit card he'd given Meffert.

In emails discussing the letter to the mayor with Meffert and their lawyer, Danny Drake, it didn't appear that St. Pierre was trying to inform the mayor. It really came from Meffert, who suggested there was another reason to write it.

"Ok, this is my final proposed letter, this might help while still protecting all of us and without boxing us in," Meffert wrote in an email to St. Pierre and Drake.

"OK, and just so I understand, this is a letter from me to the mayor, correct?" St. Pierre wrote back.

So only St. Pierre and Meffert know what they told Nagin off the record and when. And only they know why they anguished over that letter to him in the fall of 2006.